I've read that having a mentor can really help when you're a startup founder.<p>But how do you set up an effective relationship?<p>Do you have regular meetings? How often?<p>Is it helpful to have a standard agenda? What gets covered?<p>Would love to hear your experience.
Much like you'd have a relationship with anyone else. Like dating or jobs, you can hardly be passive about it. You have to go and search for one.<p>My first experience with mentoring was when I ranted about a bunch of stats on an online game. I impressed someone who asked me to be his mentor. He helped me gather more data, I helped to process them and taught him how statistics worked. It was incredibly fruitful both ways, probably my benchmark of what mentoring should be like.<p>There's another more regimented way, which I used with my thesis supervisor in university and a mentor at an incubator. Set up a meeting time, same time each week. Show what progress you've made. They'll comment on it. The mentor gave me some good insights, such how I shouldn't have designed it as Tinder, or how I should spend a week planning out my UI and testing it with people. I told him that in a week, I could build a full app and launch it to real people to test, and that's story of how I made a startup in 2 weeks and got a thousand downloads overnight.<p>Sometimes all the talk is just rubber duck debugging. I'm not even sure you need a proper mentor sometimes. Something like a devlog and fan base could work as well.<p>Mentors are best at spotting things you've never heard about though. There were many times when I considered a career path and a mentor just points out the starting point or tells me how others on that path fared.